Evaluating the information content of human microbiomes

Abstract

Microbes vastly outnumber all other organisms on earth and are integral to many aspects of the ecological fitness of the earth’s soils, oceans, animals, and plants. Unfortunately, most of the microbes in these communities cannot be cultured, so to observe these communities’ biological functions, we must study their DNA. After a researcher sequences a microbial community, they utilize informatics methods to correlate the taxonomic and functional profiles to their traits of interest. However, these methods assume that the underlying taxonomic and functional profiling are accurate. If procedures are developed to identify the profiles of a community more accurately, the increased precision will enable higher power testing of hypotheses and detection of these communities’ causal roles. We propose novel, accurate, and data-efficient methods for taxonomic and functional profiles in shotgun metagenomic datasets.